Not everyone needs to be talking to customers
New perspectives are everywhere. You don’t have to drag a bunch of people off the street to stare at your product and tell you what they think. Start with your internal customers. Everyone in a company has customers, even if they’re not building anything. You’re always making something for someone—the creative team is making stuff for marketing, ma
... See moreTony Fadell • Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making
“In our firm developing a product is like conducting an orchestra: the customers are the audience.”10
Roberto Verganti • Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean
The point in all these examples is that the customers are the people who actually know best, since they use the product or service in question: How can you enable the people who know best to do the work with you?
Jon Alexander • Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us
Interviewing creates a shared experience, often a galvanizing one, for the product development team (which can include researchers, designers, engineers, marketers, product management, and beyond).
Steve Portigal • Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
amazon.com
As soon as I started talking to different teams, I realized my superpower. A lot of engineers only trust other engineers. Just like finance people only trust finance people. People like people who think like them. So engineers often keep their distance from sales, marketing, creative—all the functions that are soft, squishy. It’s just like how many
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